By Michael Elkins
A special story by Reuters Thursday reports that between 2019 and 2022, Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) employees privately shared videos and images, some of them highly invasive, recorded by customers’ car cameras.
Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.
Tesla assured its electric car owners that their privacy “is and will always be enormously important to us.” The cameras it builds into vehicles to assist driving, it notes on its website, are “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.”
Tesla states in its online “Customer Privacy Notice” that its “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.” But seven former employees told reporters that the computer program they used at work could show the location of recordings – which potentially could reveal where a Tesla owner lived.
One ex-employee also said that some recordings appeared to have been made when cars were parked and turned off. Several years ago, Tesla would receive video recordings from its vehicles even when they were off, if owners gave consent. It has since stopped doing so.
“It was a breach of privacy, to be honest. And I always joked that I would never buy a Tesla after seeing how they treated some of these people,” said one former employee.
Another said: “I’m bothered by it because the people who buy the car, I don't think they know that their privacy is, like, not respected…We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids.”
David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, called sharing of sensitive videos and images by Tesla employees “morally reprehensible.”
“Any normal human being would be appalled by this,” he said. He noted that circulating sensitive and personal content could be construed as a violation of Tesla’s own privacy policy — potentially resulting in intervention by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which enforces federal laws relating to consumers’ privacy.
“We could see inside people's garages and their private properties,” said another former employee. “Let's say that a Tesla customer had something in their garage that was distinctive, you know, people would post those kinds of things.”
About three years ago, some employees stumbled upon and shared a video of a unique submersible vehicle parked inside a garage, according to two people who viewed it. Nicknamed “Wet Nellie,” the white Lotus Esprit sub had been featured in the 1977 James Bond film, “The Spy Who Loved Me.” The vehicle’s owner was none other than Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who had bought it at an auction in 2013. It is not clear whether Musk was aware of the video or that it had been shared.
The news agency wasn’t able to determine if the practice of sharing recordings, which occurred within some parts of Tesla as recently as last year, continues today or how widespread it was. Some former employees contacted said the only sharing they observed was for legitimate work purposes, such as seeking assistance from colleagues or supervisors.
Shares of TSLA are up 0.23% in mid-day trading on Thursday.